I’m Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Ferdinand, in desperation at the terrible plight of ship and crew, cries out, “Hell is empty and all the devils are here!”

And looking around at our situation today, it wouldn’t be difficult to reach the same conclusion. Except that our modern materialistic science doesn’t allow for that conclusion. Oh, we might utter the words, but I doubt most of us would use words like “hell” and “devils” in anything more than an illustrative sense. We almost certainly wouldn’t mean them literally.

But there is a very modern science emerging here in Brazil that does consider the power of spiritual influence to inspire the human being – both for good or for evil. And yes, I do mean a science. And what the scientist responsible for this view, Dr. Norberto Keppe, maintains is that the evil is winning as long as we don’t have more consciousness of it. That means, reuniting theology and philosophy again with exact science, as used to be the case. So we can really understand our situation.

Today, public discourse is muted, and people lament the loss of the byproducts of virtue, like falling self-discipline and rising selfishness.

Not to mention the rampant corruption at all levels of modern society that makes us fear that virtue is, in fact, long gone. As a small indicator of this, a graph of the frequency of words occurring in books over time shows a rapid rise of the word “technology” in the past 40 years against a two-century slide in virtue.

I’m Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

In the philosophy of religion, evil has always been a thorny issue. Is evil something inherent in the essence of man and nature? Or is it a willful act of ill-intentioned human beings?

And then there’s the whole confusion of natural disasters – the presence of which have even caused some thinkers to deny the existence of a perfectly good God. If hurricanes exist, this argument goes, perfect goodness doesn’t exist.

And I think it’s also safe to say that the theological concept of the existence of a being of evil as described in Judeo-Christian scripture is also controversial. A rebellion in heaven led by one of God’s brightest angels, Lucifer, is today treated mostly as allegorical or metaphorical – tales told to illustrate moral truth but not meant to be taken literally.

But in Norberto Keppe‘s deep science of Analytical Trilogy, spiritual influences in the myriad psycho-social crises we face today are considered. In fact, in Keppe’s experience, the spiritual component is more necessary.

Evil in the Modern World, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

I’m Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

I was walking down the streets of Vancouver a number of years ago after I’d been living away from the west coast for some time, and I bumped into an old acquaintance of mine in Kitsilano, the old hippy neighbourhood in the ’70s.

“What are you doing these days?” I asked her. “Channeling yoga,” came back the straight-faced reply.

Well, she was always a little out there, but it leads into what I wanted to talk about today. The field of spiritual growth has exploded over the past 50 years, maybe beginning with the Beatles and their Maharishi experience in India in the ’60s. But it’s a market with a lot of choices. From the more traditional, like church and prayer, to the more trendy, like Buddhism and meditation, to the downright weird, like, well, channeling yoga.

What to make of it all? In Dr. Norberto Keppe‘s Analytical Trilogy, he’s united theology back into science to give us a more wholistic view. And that means some universal principles. True Co-Creation, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

A few hundred years ago, the notions of heaven and hell, of God and Lucifer, were respected themes for composers, poets, and painters. Milton’s Paradise Lost contains the idea of Lucifer endeavoring to defeat Christ and regain his former position in paradise. Raphael captured the epic battle where the Archangel Michael vanquished Satan. Beethoven wrote of the desire of man to know God.

And then, somewhere along the way, the devil became largely erased as a factor in popular culture. Any modern educated person who considers the battle between the forces of dark and the forces of light as anything but a mythical allegory is considered … well, not modern today.

But of course, it still persists. The rumors of rock stars making the Faustian bargain still abound, the Rolling Stones had dire repercussions to Sympathy for the Devil at Altamont, and many modern pageants have demonic idolatry built right into their ceremonies.

So I think it’s still relevant. Women and the Dark Side, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

I’m Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. A quick word of warning right at the beginning of our program today … this is a delicate subject. In a world where speech is often paralyzed, not by an Orwelling Big Brother poised to punish us for deviations from the acceptable, but by our own individual and collective decisions as to what’s correct or now. Straying from the correct-speak causes raised eyebrows and pursed lips at best and outright shunning at worst.

It’s a politically correct world in the world, and the language has been sculpted and massaged and homogenized to remove any unwanted judgements or value statements in a total conviction that this is progress. Politically incorrect is simply not tolerated, a throwback to a time most consider downright evil.

But there’s a problem underneath all this. Unfortunately, not being able to say anything critical about anyone means real defects and problems don’t get pointed out anymore, and all this walking on eggshells means we can’t really develop. And this problem appears particularly formidable when we want to talk women’s pathology.

I’m Richard Lloyd Jones and welcome to another episode of Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. Read the literature about complex problem solving and you’re in for a challenging read. System structure and dynamics, facets of intelligence, positive and negative dependencies. It’s mind-numbing stuff that seeks to concretize often abstract what if scenarios so popular in corporate planning departments or government games theory laboratories.

The nub of the thing is this: you’ve got a goal you want to reach, and a lot of variables in the way of achieving it. What do you need to put in place to transform the state of your current reality into the desired reality?

It’s analytical, logical and quantifiable for flow charts and computer programmers. And its focus on solutions proves that complex problem solving is the territory of those pragmatic Americans, raised as they are on the can-do philosophy of Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale.